BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

As the receptionist for the Honolulu office of Belt Collins, Dawn Higa is not typically involved in design discussions. Her tasks, while vital to the day-to-day operations of the global design firm, tend toward the administrative: answering phones, directing calls, taking messages. It’s a job Higa’s held since 1987, when as a single mother she was placed at the company, which today has offices in multiple countries, including China, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, by a temp agency. “I don’t think I even knew what an engineer did for the first year,” Higa says.

But once every two years, Higa becomes an integral part of the team competing in Honolulu’s biennial RE-LEI competition, in which individuals and teams craft traditional Hawaiian lei—a garland typically made out of flowers, ferns, leaves, or nuts—out of 100 percent postconsumer waste. Registration for this year’s competition, which is open to anyone, not just those living in Hawaii, closes Saturday, March 23, 2019. The cost is $75 for individuals and $250 for teams, with discounted rates for students. RE-LEI was first organized by a group of landscape architects and planners in 2015; its proceeds support landscape architecture education and the recently created MLA program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). (more…)

REVIEWED BY JUSTIN PARSCHER

In their continual search for respect, recognition, and equal pay, landscape architects find themselves in a quandary. On one hand, they understand that credit attaches itself to authors, masters with distinct visions and styles, and are forever writing letters to the editor to assert that the city didn’t do it—the landscape architect did. They celebrate acting as project leads, not only because it validates their way of working, but because the project lead can safely be given final credit. However, having toiled so long in subsidiary roles, landscape architects are also mindful of the networks of expertise that actually form ambitious designs, particularly in the public realm. A chain of public officials, architects, structural and civil engineers, ecologists, lighting designers, and community members all contribute to the shape of the place, which is naturally also conditioned by social and environmental realities on the ground.

The urban historian Alison Isenberg’s Designing San Francisco is, among its many other virtues, a vital text for helping landscape architects think through this dilemma. Isenberg’s book focuses on (more…)

It’s the first of November, which means the latest issue of LAM is here! You’ll find these stories inside:

FOREGROUND

Lighting from the Inside Out (Lighting)
With the rising popularity of outdoor living comes a shining new crop of luminaires.

The Last Ash Standing (Plants)
The emerald ash borer beetle isn’t too fond of boring into the blue ash. If scientists can find out why, they may be able to save more trees.

Timing Is Everything (Construction)
Landscape installation should be driven by weather and nature, not financial models—but climate change is making best planting times unpredictable.

FEATURES

The River Beneath the River
After decades of neglect, the Anacostia River— Washington, D.C.’s lesser-known waterway—is poised at the edge of a hard-won environmental recovery. But where will it flow from there?

Upstream D.C.Upland from Washington, D.C.’s two rivers, the city is planning major investments
in rain-soaking infrastructure.

Found in Translation
In Seattle, MIG | SvR and Turenscape’s Hing Hay Park provides a place to gather—with a
lively nod toward the Asian Pacific American experience.

All this plus the regular Now and Goods columns. The full table of contents for November can be found here.

REVIEWED BY KOFI BOONE, ASLA

With more than 15 million views, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie’s groundbreaking TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” is likely the most viewed treatise on the consequences of making one story the story of the African continent. With surgical precision, Adichie reveals the lasting consequences of perpetuating Africa and Africans as only victims suffering from famine and war, or only the exotic backdrop for experiencing “charismatic nature.” But in the end, her most devastating criticism of the single story is embodied in her quote of the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, “If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with ‘secondly.’” Illustrating her point, Adichie asks facetiously what we would think if the story began with a “failed” African state instead of with European colonialism.

The issue of starting with “secondly” is present in cultural landscape study of the continent of Africa. The spirit of Adichie’s and Barghouti’s arguments resonates in the pages of Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by John Beardsley. The volume collects essays delivered at a symposium held at Dumbarton Oaks in 2013 and reflects an important first step in laying the foundation for future exploration. Through a wide array of disciplinary lenses, geographic locations, and time periods, Beardsley’s work eschews deriving a single conclusion about what is “African” and instead reveals the wealth of issues and opportunities with engaging the many cultures of a continent. The avoidance of narrowing and bridging the divergent voices contained within the book is challenging and perhaps belies the fact that this is one of the first mainstream publications on this topic. Given the lack of similar texts, there could be a tendency to attempt to be singular and definitive. However, borrowing from one of the book’s many themes, the result is a contribution to the “continuity” of a conversation about the lives and practices that have shaped meaningful place in Africa, a continent still invisible to the profession of landscape architecture. (more…)

BY ZACH MORTICE

Alfred Caldwell. Image courtesy Deborah and Richard Polansky.

“The house is not a machine for living—it is the man’s sense of himself,” Alfred Caldwell once said. And in designing his own home and farm compound in rural Wisconsin, Caldwell forged a bridge between Jens Jensen’s Prairie style and International style modernism, an intersection of design currents that never solidified as much as its forebears. His most cherished project might be Chicago’s Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, where whorls of meandering paths orbit and shield views around a pond and an earthy, horizontal pavilion. But he was also one of the first American faculty members hired by Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and his lush landscape at the architect’s austere Lafayette Park neighborhood in Detroit provides a poetic counterpoint to van der Rohe’s crystalline rationality.

BY ZACH MORTICE

Morgan Vickers at Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. Photo by David Kafer.

Route 66, the nation’s first all-paved national highway connecting the Midwest to California, is best read as the first draft of contemporary America. Its establishment in 1926 definitively ended any notions of an untamed Western frontier, and it signaled the beginning of America’s total transition to a nation defined by settlement, landscape, and automobile obsession.

So much of Route 66’s cultural resources and history are dedicated and scaled to the car: motels, highways, bridges, gas stations, drive-in theaters, and oddball curios that read well from a speeding Ford. Its 2,400 miles cut through eight states and 300 towns, from Chicago to Los Angeles. It channeled migrants to the fertile coast during the Great Depression and soldiers and equipment to the Asian front during World War II.

But Route 66 eventually fell victim to the car’s success. In 1945, 65,000 cars were manufactured in America. Three years later that number had grown to 3.9 million. Cars became so omnipresent that this two-lane road was soon superseded by four-lane interstate highways. By the time it was decommissioned in 1985, Route 66 had been replaced by sections of I-55, I-44, I-40, I-15, and I-10. Overshadowed by the interstate system, the communities that had sprung up around the route were cut off from the lifeblood of commerce that it supplied them.

Earlier this summer, the National Trust for Historic Preservation began a campaign(more…)